less resources more imagination

I am a HUGE fan of TV games. Ten or fifteen years ago there was a rash of vintage games brought back to life via single joystick consoles that connected direct to the TV via A/V ports. They made Atari 2600 games, Intellivision games, and old arcade games. There were retro-inspired originals and I even had a Chinese bootleg unit that played some of the NES classics. These units took batteries and were totally awesome in many respects. This TV games trend lasted for a while, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that the craze seemed to fizzle out. There are still a few out there that a touch more advanced these days such as the Atari Flashback series (that has become pretty advanced).

Today finding some of the old TV games is kinda hard. They go for good money on Ebay, I saw one of the C64 sticks for over $100. Needless to say, I was excited when I saw an unopened TV game called COLECO Video Game System at my local Goodwill for $2.99. I bought it without a second thought. That was perhaps a mistake. I want my $2.99 back.

When I saw COLECO Video Game System on the Goodwill shelf and saw that it has SIX sports games, my memory went back to the early 80’s when I owned a Coleco Adam computer. The Adam was just a souped up Colecovision game system with a tape drive, keyboard and printer. I remembered playing Colecovision sports games like Baseball, and Summer Games–really good games back in 1984. I thought that the COLECO Video Game System would be Colecovision sports games… I was wrong.

The package makes this look appealing, it’s not.

Whoever made the COLECO Video Game System must have either been on a tight budget or just the type of person who hates fun. This thing is a combination of the worst qualities of the vintage video game era with none of the charm. Colecovision sports games? No way! These are like portable LCD games ported to a TV screen. It’s hard to believe that anyone would do that for any reason at all. It’s like selling tickets to a five second animated GIF that’s showing on an IMAX screen, it’s pointless and a waste of space. You need to play these games to believe how boring they really are. Racquetball is the most exciting and that’s because it’s a PONG derivative–not a fun one. The players in the games like Soccer and Basketball are STATIC, you just highlight them (just like an LCD game). I imagine that these were ripped right off of some of the old Coleco handhelds of the late 70’s and very early 80’s. Those games were fun in LCD format and for their time, but they are NOT fun on a TV, they feel limited as crap. I can’t say enough about how bad these games are (all six of them) but I couldn’t spend more than two minutes on any of them before I felt like I was wasting my life.

Besides the fact that the games are virtually unplayable, the controller is incredibly awkward. It’s a square with directions on it that’s about as ergonomical as an iron maiden. Along with the discomfort is the fact that it’s not responsive at all either. the four buttons (that I still can’t figure out how to use in games) are situated in a way that makes sure you can’t use them even if you knew how. All in all the best feature of the controller is the OFF switch that ends the torture.

Why would anyone make this thing? I can’t imagine, but I have some theories as to why it’s so bad:

1.) Colecovision games were too expensive to licence (although I can’t imagine why since Coleco went belly up thirty-something years ago), so they people who made this went for the set of games they could afford: the LCD Coleco Games.

2.) The development team was made up of former Nazi scientists who wanted revenge for their loss in 1945.

3.) Someone, a crazy person, thought these games were fun and needed to be ported to TV.

4.) This unit is an inside joke between some engineers and developers who are laughing their asses off.

5.) Rather than doing any marketing research this unit was developed by a group of executives in a board room that had gone loopy due to a malfunction in the ventilation system that deprived their brains of oxygen.

What more can I say about how much I hate this thing? Don’t any of you dare to buy this online for ten bucks, or whatever it costs, it’s not worth it. If you want the same experience for free go find a blank wall and stare at it for two hours, then poke yourself in the eyes and repeat until you can’t take it anymore.

I live in Southern California and so original Disneyland is very accessible, as long as I can scrape up the insane $120 admission fee, to me. On a recent trip to the old mouse lair I decided to visit The Enchanted Tiki Room. The Tiki Room isn’t a ride, it’s a show, it’s an animatronic show. At some point in the 50’s or 60’s that racist dreamer Walt Disney decided that there weren’t enough performing robots in the world, I don’t think there were any before he thought of creating them, so he used his vast wealth to make a bunch. Some of you may cringe at my pointing out that Walt was a racist. Sorry to disappoint ya’ll, but he was and it’s made fairly clear in most of his creations. It’s okay that he was racist, to judge him by todays standards would be anachronistic. There is no doubt that he was a visionary, in spite of his obvious feelings of white superiority. Anyhow, that’s all a subject for sociologists and race scholars and I am neither.

After my visit to Disneyland I started to wonder about what the hell kind of computers these guys used to make all the rides, and the Tiki Room, do all the animatronic crap that they did at a time when transistors were relatively new (maybe like 20 years old), and the microprocessor was still a few years away. Well it turns out that to make these advanced rides, or shows like the Tiki Room, work with all the animatronic goodness of a Disneyland experience it took a room full of computer. That’s right COMPUTER, one computer that took up a very big room. You could hook up a $40 Arduino that fits in your palm to the Tiki Room now and probably get that crap to work, but back then it took a room full of computer.

There’s a spattering of information out there about the engineering that went into the computers of Disneyland, but it’s fairly few and far between. I have to imagine that it has to do with the general public’s apathy toward our computer heritage and the fact that The Mouse keeps a tight reign on his IP (Intellectual Property). I found a great article on the subject of Disney animatronics that you can read HERE. It tells a lot more about the nature of the audio animatronics, how they were originally developed by NASA, yada yada…

I think all you retro computer heads, and curious bystanders, should watch the five minute clip below and see the magic of the original Tiki Room computer in a room. As an added bonus you get the Tiki computer room tour narrated by Jose, the star of the Tiki Room and SUPER racist depiction of a Mexican accent. Take note of how Jose doesn’t make complete sentences and speaks like a cave person. You also get to meet Julie, the representative of Disneyland who would NEVER be allowed by papa Walt to date a Mexican.

Today the Tiki Room is run by a new computer system–probably some sort of high end PLC (Programable Logic Controller) with truckloads of I/O and built in relays. The whole thing is probably the size of a dishwasher–bigger than the palm sized Arduino but also more reliable in the long run, after all the Tiki Room has to run all day for how ever many days Disneyland is open. Also, today we can identify and laugh at how freaking racist Walt’s great white vision was and even learn from it, or at least laugh at it a little. Enjoy the show!

When I was ten years old the world was a VERY different place. It was 1984 and The Last Starfighter was the pinnacle of computer graphics. Watching that movie as a ten year old kid I had no idea at all that the outer space scenes were rendered on a Cray supercomputer. If I watch the movie now it’s very obvious that the spacecraft and battles are CGI, but in the early 80’s we had never seen anything like that before and so assumed that these were the same type of plastic models used in Buck Rogers and Star Wars. We 80’s kids had dreams of the future, but they weren’t what you might think they were because they were based on what we knew.

I was sure I’d have a personal robot.

Young me would often imagine the year 2000 (two-thousand) as a time when I would have a personal helper robot and be able to visit a Hilton hotel on the moon. I thought sure that I would get to the moon on a Pan Am or TWA rocket, and that when I got there I would break out my portable suitcase computer. If I imagined myself as being pretty rich in the year 2000 (and I did), I would assume that I might have a telephone in my car, or perhaps in my briefcase. I was pretty sure there would be flying cars and that i would be eating food that was more like astronaut food that could be expanded into real food with warm water. Monorails, I thought that the city of Los Angeles, where I still live, would have a monorail system that resembled the one in Disney Land or at least a PeopleMover.

I thought future cities would look like Disney Tomorrow Land.

Yes, my 80’s kid view of the future was almost nothing like it turned out to be–because now I live in the future and the next future is the new future that I’m sure I’m imagining just as wrong as I imagined the future back then. My ten year old self never imagined anything like the internet, touch screens, mobile devices, or flat screen TVs. My future was the advancement of technology I could see and understand.

This is what I thought my portable computer would be like.

In some ways I feel like I’m still waiting for a future that will never happen. Someplace deep down I still hold out hope for that PeopleMover or for that Moon trip. While I’m amazed, and generally happy, about how technology–especially computer technology–turned out, that little piece of me that wanted a personal robot butler or a future version of the C64 is just a little disappointed. I miss the days when you weren’t glued to a global information network. I miss when you could say you weren’t home to take a phone call. I miss the days when I couldn’t tell the difference between a plastic model and CG.

Our world is a mess, at least the human part of it is a mess, and the mess is going to be super hard to clean up because it’s humungous. At the core of the mess humanity has made of itself and the planet we live on is one of the deadly sins… Greed.

What is greed? That’s a long and philosophical debate that’s probably out of the scope of a retro computer blog but I’m going to tackle it anyhow, only because I think that vintage computing may hold some of the answers–at least on an abstract level–to the problems humanity faces moving forward. What’s greed though? I think at the core, greed is having or using more of anything than is needed.

Greed has been good, just ask Gordon Gekko, in a lot of ways. There is all sorts of fantastic decadent artwork and culture that has sprung from greed. We wouldn’t have Rococo if it weren’t for greed. By the same token, we probably wouldn’t have a lot of the amazing computer technologies we enjoy today as well. Our entire digital platform as a species is based on a greed for processing power and data and for the innovation, that type of greed has been good. However, our culture of more and more and more and more on top of that has had dire consequences.

He said “greed is good.”

Humanity is moving into a critical phase where we might just as easily destroy ourselves as make the next evolutionary leap. Humans take a greed perspective by default because it’s a safe bet. Worried about getting hungry? Store a crap load of food. Think your neighbor might steal your horse? Kill him, and then kill his entire family so that you don’t have to worry about revenge. Want to make a fun game for a computer? Throw a crapload of processing power and memory at your project and it will be awesome. As we move forward as a species, this is a terrible way to look at things. It’s not only going to ensure that we destroy ourselves, it’s going to make us weak when we have to start dealing with dwindling resources on a planet with way too many people. What can we do? How do we get over this greed thing? I think that things like Pico-8 hold, at least in abstract, the answer.

Erin Gray was hot in Buck Rogers.

Pico-8 is a “Fantasy Console.” That’s what the guy who created it calls it. I think that Pico-8 is more of virtual console, because it’s pretty much real and not pretend, so not so much a fantasy. I think of a fantasy as my dream of marrying Erin Gray circa 1980, it’s never gonna happen. But Pico-8 is happening, and people, including myself, are making, sharing and playing awesome little games with it.

The Pico-8 programing environment is fully integrated.

That’s right, you can make, play and share games or programs on the “Fantasy” console, but back to why Pico-8 solves the problem of greed; the resources you use to develop your games are incredibly limited. Okay, Pico-8 isn’t Atari VCS limited, but it’s still limited as crap. I won’t bore you with the technicalities, you can bore yourself with that when you try Pico-8 out, but I’ll tell you that if you want to make a game that’s even slightly more extensive than Space Invaders that you’re going to have to use some creative resource management. And it’s that skill that I believe is lacking in many of the problem solvers of the Western world; we just use way too much to do way too little. Developing on Pico-8 can help to alleviate some of the propensity for greed that first worlders suffer from. But enough about all that, lets look at some fun aspects of the Fantasy Console.

Pico-8 has easy to use sound and music tools.

Pico-8 is only $15, and games are free. You can get Pico-8 and another title called Voxatron for $20–I haven’t tried Voxatron yet but I will–both are supposedly pre-release beta or alpha, but you can do plenty with either of them. Pico-8 has lots of free games that have been created by members of the community. You don’t have to own a copy to play the games online, and you can publish any of your games on the Pico-8 BBS, or on your own website if you want. You need to buy a copy if you want to develop games, and you need some programming knowledge (not much) to get started developing. Pico-8 uses the programming language Lua, that is very well documented in it’s own right, and the Pico-8 documentation is all you really need. You can run the console on a PC, Mac, Linux, or even a Raspberry Pi.

I think the best part about Pico-8 for me personally is that it has an intentionally limited scope. I can’t get all crazy Don Quixote on it because I’m limited. And that not only means a good deal more creativity comes out, but it also means that I’ll finish a project. Not to un-toot my own horn, but I do tend to start projects, expand their scope, and never finish the project … Because I made it too big. However, Pico-8 keeps me well constrained! I was able to complete a rather good game, if I do say so myself, without going all nutty project scope crazy. I’m just saying that if you’re a big dreamer like me Pico-8 is good medicine for getting things done.

I could say a bunch more but I think it’s best for anyone interested to just go and check out the Pico-8 Website. There you’ll get all the info and the good stuff. And, like I said, Pico-8 can teach you, your kids, your students, your neighbor who’s family you killed because you were worried about loosing your horse, how to do more with less. And that’s the only way we’re ever going to have a chance in hot hinges of hades of finding solutions to that ball of problems that might just make us the next dinosaurs for the insect people to find and put in their museums in a hundred million years.

Was it the late 90’s or early 2000’s when the thing to do was to name your band “The <insert lead singer name here> Project?” Yeah it was around that time I think, I even knew some girl who had a band with that very name (her name rather than <insert lead singer name here>); you get the point.

I’m making my own band (project), but this one is an Atari 2600 (VCS) deal. I’m going full bore retro-head geek and finally making a home-brew game for Atari 2600–maybe. But! Like all good projects this one spun way off the cake as I expanded the scope so wide that it’s anyone’s guess if I’ll ever complete it, but dammit it’s still fun to take that journey isn’t it? Therefore, I’m going to (in the words of a university professor I had in business school) “eat the elephant one bite at a time.” And this elephant is a big and retro bad girl, she’s a man-eater and this is why:

I started out by stumbling on an Atari 2600 cartridge shell that I have the ability to print on thingverse.com, that led to a dream I’ve always had of making my own cartridge game. I’ve been down this road before and I have 20 empty 2600 cartridges, a 4k eeprom, an eeprom burner, and a stack of old cartridge boards from the last time I wanted to do this and never followed through. In my mind this just means I’m ready to go forward with my quest for a home-brewed Atari game that’s not purely virtual. And the fever was reignited by that damn 3D printer file. Now I don’t NEED to print out a cartridge shell, I have 20 empty ones, but for some reason, I guess it’s the potential to make 20+ Atari games, I’m all hot to do this. And the printable atari cart takes like 12 hours to print, so it’s incredibly inefficient and so even more appealing to me.

Empty carts I’ve had for years.

Old game boards and in the bag is a 2K EEPROM.

This is the EEPROM burner that I’ve had for years.

In my mind the project has started and I’m a future retro-game tycoon with offices in the financial district of Los Angeles and a marketing budget that allows for Super Bowl adds. Yes, I will be the one to bring retro-games to the masses and it will all start on my Etsy store. Never mind that this is a niche market in a niche market, my classical training in marketing tells me that once I get some influencers as early adopters, this new Atari 2600 game business is going to start flying like Saturn V. Ah, but I don’t have ( a working) Atari 2600! No problem, I’ll add more sauce to this project by deciding that the best thing ever is for me to NOT to buy a working 2600 on eBay, but rather to buy a working Atari Flashback 2 and mod it with a cartridge slot. And yes, I already have that bad boy on order and I’m downloading the 3D prints for the cart slot right now.

This project has gone from probably doable, but not gonna get done, to no chance in hell of ever getting done. One bite at at time though. And I’ve ignored the main focus of the whole thing: programing the game in the first place–I’m gong to use Batari Basic. So, here’s the list of things to do, and why this is the OVERVIEW. This list is in order of what SHOULD happen first, second… But I’ll be honest, it will probably happen in a much more haphazard manner:

Part I – Program the Game

Part II – Write the Game ROM to an EEPROM

Part III – Decorate a Cart

Part IV – Make the Innards of the Cart

Part V – Mod the Flashback 2 to Play Carts

Part VI – Test My Game

Sheesh, this looks like a lot of work and I’ve only listed the top level tasks. One bite at a time. Anyhow, I’m going to continue to share my progress on my Quixotic quest to publish my own Atari 2600 game like 35 years late. I hope you continue to follow the progress, learn with me, go bananas with me… Let’s do this.

Stay tuned for more on this thing. Will I get it done? How long will it take? We shall see.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the end of Atari, it was the beginning of Nintendo. Back in 83, due to market saturation, the video game market crashed. It was a video game recession that lasted for two years and put the brakes on home video game systems in the United States.

There’s probably a lot of theories and opinions out there about all the nuances of 83, but it’s hard to dispute what ended it… Nintendo. Not just any Nintendo, the Nintendo Entertainment System.

I think there was a lot of fear in the video game industry due to 83. Companies didn’t want to take a risk on video game systems while Atari 2600’s were being blown out for $50 at Thrifty Drug, and Toys R Us was selling games for $5 with a $5 rebate. Nope, things were pretty grim. But what I think they missed is that the enthusiasm of young gamers like myself at the time was not waining in the least, we just wanted something better, something new.

And that new thing was NES. It was for sure better. The graphics were unbelievable for the time, in fact they were as good as an arcade game, Super Mario Brothers to be exact. The graphics on the NES home system Super Mario Brothers were the same as the graphics in the arcade. That doesn’t seem like a big deal in todays world where you carry a supercomputer that’s connected to the world network in your pocket but back in 85 the same graphics as the arcade was a big deal. First off, Super Mario Brothers in the arcade was already state of the art, all those shaded pipes and Mario (or Luigi) got big when you ate the mushroom, and there were discernible textures… That crap was real to us kids.

Besides the amazing graphics and arcade experience NES came with a Robot and a light gun. Now I never got the robot because I bought an NES later when they started offering the core, but if you got an NES in 85 you got a light gun and a robot. I think the light gun was probably a lot more fun than the robot, but it was a robot so you just wanted it because it was a robot. Neither one of those accessories translated into long term gaming trends–do you use a light gun or a robot on any of your modern video games? If you do please send me a link to where I get that game. However, the robot and the gun were marketing hooks that sold NES systems and by extension NES games.

That’s how Nintendo ended up dominating the video game world, with a robot and a gun. I mean I guess if you have a robot and a gun you’re ahead of any game, but the folks at Nintendo understood what it was that we kids wanted and they delivered. That’s what business is all about, figure out your target market and serve them a heaping pile of what it is they want. Nintendo solved the problem of not having a system that was as good as the arcade and it included a gun and a robot that solved the problem of wanting something different. It worked, they sold a zillion of um.

Today the video game market is a lot different. I don’t pretend to understand what the kids want now, I just know they want things I couldn’t even imaging when I was a kid and it’s all because Nintendo figured out how to sell video games at a time when just about everyone else had given up on them. That’s what marketing is all about baby.

Air combat simplified. You are the only hope for the base in your Skyfox fighter plane. It’s supersonic, it has laser guns, and an autopilot that finds enemies. You can train or fight in a full invasion. It’s an out of the blue original with an unoriginal storyline but no actual popular culture root for the specific Skyfox story. It has a short comic strip on the inside of the box and that’s the extent of our understanding of the Skybox universe. That’s how a lot of games were back then, out of the blue originals with fantastic story lines that weren’t formulated by marketing focus groups or quantitative data about what target demographics want. Skyfox and the games like it were pure imagination.

I still have this game in the original box, that’s quite an accomplishment seeing as I probably got it around 1987 or so. I don’t play the original for fear of wearing this treasure out (that’s how I feel about all my originals), so I’ve been playing Skyfox on my VICE emulator.

This game is challenging but fast paced enough to keep you going back after each death. Lots and lots of enemies to kill, not like some of the old simulators that make you fly around for virtual hours looking for something to shoot at before you run out of fuel. You do run out of fuel kinda fast in Skyfox and for some reason when you do you explode.

It’s a good thing that cars don’t explode when you run out of gas because if they did I’d have been dead like ten times now. In Skyfox you die when you run out of gas, so don’t fly at full speed the whole time. Besides if you do you risk flying by the enemies so fast you can’t shoot them.

I think my favorite thing about Skyfox is the autopilot. When you can’t find enemies just push the “a” key and you get taken to things to shoot. I also like that you launch when you start in a totally Battlestar Galactica-esque launch bay thing (I feel like Starbuck). The graphics need a commendation too, they are as full color as the C64 is capable of and made to appear as 3D as possible.

Since I have Skyfox in the box, it means that I must have purchased it at Toys ‘R’ Us (RIP), because I seem to remember it behind the plexiglass display with the tickets you pulled out to take to the register (I miss that method of buying games). I’m sure it cost $9.99, that’s what most of the C64 games cost at TRU in the late 80’s because they were blowing um out. C64 games took up valuable shelf space in a world where NES and SEGA were just beginning to dominate.

The way the computer isle looked back in the 80’s at TRU.

When Nintendo took over it was the end of an era but the beginning of a new one. The C64 began a decline at the dawn of the NES era so games like Skyfox became less and less prevalent. When Nintendo began its takeover it restarted a system of homogeny of games that temporarily stifled the eclectic nature of the game industry as a whole. For a little while there wasn’t room for the out of the blue originals like Skyfox.

Splash Screen

Now we live in a world where variety is endless. However, I think that the reign of Nintendo–while it revitalized the industry–may have had the unintentional effect of killing the untamed imagination in games of the future. I’m just speculating but almost all games, commercial or independent, today seem to lack that unleashed creativity that was present in the early days. It’s probably just a function of an art form maturing and there are bound to be periods to come of games that are new types of expression–the art form is very new by historical standards. Projects like Pico-8, I think, are bringing new unfettered expression to video games. We shall see.

Me, actually playing.

All academic discussion aside, Skyfox is worth a go on your favorite C64 emulator. Maybe you’ll get farther in it than I have so far, maybe you’ll see what I mean by unfettered creativity, or maybe you’ll hate the game and call me a liar. Whatever the outcome, may you save the base from the enemy always.

A seriously hard game that came out for NES around the same time as Metroid. Actually, I think they came out at the exact same time but whatever. The first time I saw Kid Icarus I was at a friends house–I always checked out the best games at friend’s houses–and we called it, Kid Ic-are-us because we didn’t realize it was a shout out to the Icarus of Greek mythology. I was amazed this game when I first saw it, the graphics were astounding, and the gameplay was fun and original. But it was hard as hell, and even as a tween I wasn’t all about playing video games at the expense of all else, I mean this was puberty onset time and girls were getting particularly interesting.

In my tweens, girls and video games hadn’t made the full meld that they have today. I mean its not unusual to find gamer girls today who ride skateboards and call themselves nerds, as in: “Oh my god! I’m such a nerd!” Quick side note, if you say “Oh my god! I’m such a nerd!” you aren’t a nerd. I’m a nerd. Playing some video games on your X-box does not a nerd make. If you know what apt-get install mame means than you might be a nerd. I should do a “you might be a nerd” list.

Back to Kid Icarus. It was always something of a gold standard for me. I never got a copy in my youth so my experience with it was limited. That made it this totally mysterious and attractive game that I always wanted but never really had the opportunity to get into. It’s kinda like when you’re a NERD and the pretty girl never talks to you so you build up this idea that she’s really rad, then you grow up and date the pretty girl and realize that the REAL nerd girl was the best choice after all. Not that that’s what happened to me 🙂

Anyhow, Kid Icarus was the pretty girl because I bought a copy on eBay years later, like five years ago, and started playing it, and found that it’s way too hard to be worth the effort of finishing. But it’s a fun game and cool, and if I had unlimited time on my hands–and I don’t–I might spend my days attempting to kill Medusa or whatever the ultimate goal of the game is.

Today I want you kids in the audience to get a picture of what it was like growing up in the 80’s video game wise and do it with one of my favorite games, Tapper. Video games in the 80’s were pretty rad, but they were especially rad in the arcade. They weren’t as rad at home even if you had Colecovision. I’m talking early 80’s here like 83 (I would have been 9). I had an Atari 2600, and the deficit between a game you played in the arcade vs. the Atari 2600 version was pretty wide.

You don’t have those problems today. Today there are no REAL arcades–please don’t say Dave n Busters, that’s not a real arcade. The best games today are played at home on home systems that would have been considered science fiction miracles or world domination level supercomputers back in 83. During my formative years you did what you could to get anything that resembled the rad games in the arcade. Tapper is an excellent example of how this went down.

As a kid you went down to the local arcade–my favorite was called Westworld–and you played some cool game, one of them was Tapper. Tapper looked like this when you played it:

This is ARCADE Tapper.

Pretty cool right? Probably as good as it got in 83 as far as graphics go. Next you were out and about at a store that sold games (Toys R Us, SEARS) and you saw TAPPER, the game you just played in the Arcade the other day. Wow! If you had an Atari you would be able to play Tapper at home!

If you were smart you would look at the back of the box and see what the graphics looked like, if not you were in for a surprise…

Tapper on the 2600.

And to be honest you didn’t care. These were very good graphics for a home system, the game played… er, kind of the same, maybe slower with less embellishment, but it played about the same. This was the way it was, and when other game systems began to become available the goal became to get games that were as close the their arcade counterparts as possible. You could never quite do it, but you tired. Colecovision was better, and Atari had the 5200 that was better, but you never did get the full arcade experience. Until… Nintendo.